'I'll be seeing you:' swizzle sticks tell Montreal WW II love story
CBC
Lisa Rawas was going through her late mother's personal effects when she found them.
The wooden stirring spoons were small and thin, covered in even smaller handwriting. Some of the words were faded, but Rawas said they were still easy enough to read.
"Memories. I love you. Savoy Club, March 27, 1944," read one.
"Gordon + Marg, Esquire Club, I'll be seeing you — always," read another, dated February 1944. Signed with, "All my love, Gordon, xx."
Rawas said she knew immediately what they were. Her mother, Margaret Eddisford Légaré, who died in January at the Verdun Hospital, had spoken before about her wartime boyfriend. A man she had loved, but in the end, had never married.
"She always regretted that she didn't wait for him," Rawas said. "She told me she still wondered how he was. I don't think he died in the war. I think she knew he came back," she said.
By then, Rawas said her mother was with someone else — Rawas's father.
"But she never forgot him," she said.
It wasn't just the spoons. Rawas said she found hundreds of photographs and a golden heart-shaped locket, with the sailor's face nestled inside.
"I was really surprised how much she kept. The locket kind of surprised me because it's very intimate and, you know, you're married to somebody else," she said. "But I think she just squirreled it away and [my father] didn't even know she had it, these spoons and these pictures."
Rawas said she didn't know how her mother met the man, who signed one of the spoons as Gordon Stones, though her mother often referred to him as Gordie.
Both of Margaret's brothers also enlisted during World War II and Rawas heard one of them used to introduce his war buddies "to the girls."
"I think it was quite a thing back then, where everybody kind of got together, and these guys were living for the moment because they didn't know if they'd be back," she said.
Looking through the pictures, Rawas saw a side of her mother she'd never known — "a vivacious, stylish woman who's always dressed to the nines," she said.